Cops Ain't Your Friends
by NezumiPi
Summary: Rick and Daryl, scavenging abandoned houses, have a conversation about domestic violence and the role of the police.


"Come upstairs!" shouted Rick. "Bring the wrench!" Normally, he'd keep quieter, but Daryl had been ripping copper pipes out of the first floor, making far more noise than a quick shout.

The banging stopped, and Daryl appeared at the base of the stairwell. "What'd you find?"

"A detachable showerhead," said Rick, grinning like he'd won the lottery. (Of course, the lottery would be absolutely useless now, so maybe grinning like he'd found a dozen rifles, or grinning like he'd stumbled upon some unexpired penicillin.)

Daryl snorted. "Anything's detachable if you hit it hard enough," he argued, but tromped up the stairs anyway, handing Rick the wrench and peeking in the bathroom to see what was so special about the rich people's shower. They were in a cul-de-sac in an upscale neighborhood that had apparently been hit by a mudslide early in the outbreak. They had hoped that the mess and destruction had discouraged prior scavengers and had thus far been vindicated.

"Thanks," said Rick, as he immediately began peeling back the plumbers tape and dislodging the showerhead from the outflow. "This is going to make Michonne very happy."

Daryl squinted at the fixture. It was a pretty normal shower, except there was a long flexible tube running from the outflow to the spout, which situated in a mount where a normal showerhead would be. He supposed you were supposed to take the spout off the handle and spray the water exactly where you- Oh. Yeah. Well, if his limited knowledge of pleasing women was even remotely correct, he could see why they might like such a device. Daryl realized he was blushing. "Keep the wrench," he muttered, and backed out of the room.

Rick didn't appear to notice, crowing over his prize.

The next house was completely empty, apparently having been in between owners when the world went to shit, so they ripped out a few key pipes and wires (Eugene wanted dimmer switches for some reason) before moving on.

The third house was absolutely brimming with useful stuff, which was good but uncomfortable. The more things there were, the more they could infer about the family who were probably all dead. A kid's bike, a Nintendo, a book of crosswords, a kayak, a wedding album: they all served as clear indicators of their owners' lives. This house had another story to tell, underneath the Atkins cookbook and unfinished knitting. They had both seen the plastered-over holes in the walls. Daryl saw _The Day My Daddy Lost His Temper_ crammed behind some clothes in the kid's room, and Rick found _Should I Stay or Should I Go?_ between the mattress and bedspring in the master bedroom. They didn't say anything, just tossed their discoveries in a hallway pile of intact, but currently unnecessary belongings. It took almost an hour to check all the shit in the attic, although it was ultimately worthwhile, yielding camping equipment, sports gear that would make good armor, and two boxes of old ham radio equipment that could probably be put to good use.

When Rick came down the ladder, he saw Daryl standing at the kid's bedroom door, fidgeting with the latch. "You do a lot of calls like this when you were a cop?"

"Yeah," said Rick. "Depended on the shift, but sure, I got plenty."

"In places like this?"

"More than you'd think." Rick sighed. "Most years I'd say upwards of a quarter of house calls were DV."

A moment passed before Daryl realized that DV must be short for domestic violence, not disease-comma-venereal. "It get to you?"

"Some," said Rick. "There was so much of it; I got pretty desensitized. I was pretty good at not taking my work home with me. 'Sides, it really upset Lori, so I tried not to talk about it too much."

Daryl's hand dropped down from the latch. "There was a gun under the kid's bed, a little .25. No ammo, though." He picked up his pack from the ground. "You find anything?"

"Spices, socks, tampons, couple of books on gardening. Some batteries and candles. A teapot that might be silver." Eugene was confident he had read somewhere that silver dissolved in water could be used to prevent infection, which was all well and good, but none of them were particularly good at identifying precious metals. "You get anything besides the gun?"

"Pair of boots. Aspirin. Nothin' fancy."

Rick touched the latch. "I used to think the worst ones were missing persons, because there was the not-knowing. Could be fine, could be bad, could be terrible. There was this one woman, Jane. She was in her twenties, but she had some kind of…I don't know what the right name is, I guess mental disabilities? Not smart, mind like a little kid."

Daryl nodded his acknowledgement. He didn't know the right word either, but he knew what Rick meant.

"Jane," continued Rick, "we kept getting calls about her. Maybe ten times she wandered away from home and we had to find her before she got hurt, got raped, got dead. And every time, me and Shane, we did it. We brought her home. We always told her parents they had to do better, and they did, they put alarms on the doors, a fence around the yard, but Jane kept getting out." Rick rested his hand on his gun. "One night, Shane and I were patrolling when we got the call. Jane had got hit by a car, died on impact. I remember feeling so bad for the man driving the car. It wasn't his fault at all, she just walked right in front of him."

"Shit," said Daryl.

"Shane took the driver down to the station to do the paperwork. I went with the body, waited for her parents to come in and make the ID. I'm sitting there in the morgue, and all of a sudden, I see something I never noticed before: There's skin under her fingernails." Rick shook his head. "I call the medical examiner. There's no answer, so I call his goddamn mistress and tell him to get his ass down there. He does a surface examination while Shane stalls the parents and she's got these long, thin white lines down her back, her thighs, her buttocks. She's got these little white circles on her arms and her breasts – cigarette burns." Rick was baring his teeth, breathing noisily. "We kept trying to bring her home. We never asked what she was running away from."

Daryl grunted, a sound that could have indicated approval, neutral acknowledgement, forgiveness, blame, or mild stomach pain.

"Come on," said Rick, "we've got two more houses."

The next house had a large stash of skin mags. Rick flipped through a few before shoving them in his pack. Daryl rolled his eyes and went back downstairs to search the kitchen, which was where Rick found him twenty minutes later, eating handfuls of stale cereal and cradling an unopened bottle of whiskey.

Rick dropped his pack on the floor, listening to the maybe-silver-but-probably-not teapot clatter, and sat down next to Daryl. He held his hand out for the whiskey, and Daryl complied. "Good find," said Rick. He opened it, took a swig, and passed it back to Daryl. "You ever try calling the cops on…" He left the end of the sentence open, as it had never been formally established who exactly was responsible for the scars on Daryl's back, though there were really only two feasible suspects.

Daryl didn't answer for almost a minute and Rick had begun to wonder if he had made a mistake by asking when Daryl downed the whiskey so fast he was nearly sucking on the bottle. When he handed it back, he said, "Yeah, when I was maybe eight or nine. We didn't have a phone, not one that worked anyway, but there was this old deaf fucker who lived two houses down, his phone worked."

"Why'd the deaf guy have a phone?"

"No idea. But it meant he didn't hear me sneaking into his place. So when my dad was ballin' up my mom, I went in there and called 911."

"Did it help?"

"Nope. I mean, they came and broke it up, but it didn't make thing any better. And all three of them – my mom, dad, and Merle – were all pissed at me, even though they didn't know how I did it."

"Did you ever do it again?"

"Yeah, which was stupid, right? Didn't work the first time, why just keep doing it? I guess I figured it was like sunscreen or seat belts: doesn't really do any good but just something you're supposed to do."

Rick considered pointing out that both sunscreen and seat belts served legitimate purposes in promoting health and safety, but decided against it.

"It was, I dunno, maybe the third or fourth time I called, when Merle got mouthy with the cop, so they put him up against the squad car and frisked him. He was already on probation, so when they found a dime bag in his pocket, they took him in, sent him to juvie."

"How long?"

"Forty-five days. Not too bad. But our mom died while he was in. I wouldn't've forgave me for that."

"I'm guessing you never called 911 after that."

"I was a slow learner, not a total moron."

Rick stood up and offered a hand to Daryl. "Come on," he said, "we got one house left."

Daryl took a final sip from the bottle before capping it and putting it in his pack. He took Rick's offered hand. "Kinda weird," he said, "kinda shit."

"What is?"

"That it took the end of the world for a guy like you and a guy like me to be friends."


End file.
